In recent years, most mobile terminals such as mobile phones have a positioning function such as Global Positioning System (GPS). Thus, users of the mobile terminals can acquire current positional information on the basis of positioning results of the mobile terminals and can receive various kinds of service information according to current positions of the users by transmitting the positioning results to communication providers or information distribution devices of service providers via networks.
As a technology for acquiring positional information of users, there is known a method disclosed in PTL 1. PTL 1 discloses a method of acquiring a user position by capturing a coordinate position of latitude and longitude of a mobile phone on the basis of triangulation carried out transmitting a plurality of signals to the mobile phone, signal intensities of a plurality of signals, a difference between incoming times of different signals, a difference between incoming angles of different signals, GPS signals, and a combination thereof.
To effectively perform service information distribution according to one piece of information of a user, distribution of service information according to a location and a time at which the user visits in future is required to be performed. Therefore, it is preferable to estimate areas which users are highly likely to visit in future and then perform distributing service information accordingly.
As technologies for estimating areas which users are highly likely to visit in future and distributing service information according to the areas, technologies disclosed in PTL 2 to PTL 4 have been proposed in the related art.
For example, in PTL 2, a location transition model between staying locations in which transition patterns between staying locations of users are extracted and an appearance probability of the transition pattern is associated with each transition pattern between staying locations is constructed. Then, PTL 2 discloses that a future position of a user is estimated by retrieving portable terminals that have taken movement routes similar to a movement route of a portable terminal on the basis of longest matching portion sequence lengths of previous staying or residence time-series data and staying or residence time-series data related to other portable terminal.
PTL 3 discloses that two high-order sites with a saying time or a residence frequency of a user are determined as private-related sites such as a home or a workplace and sites at which the user frequently stops by for an average staying time equal to or greater than a threshold are determined as public-related sites. PTL 4 discloses that appropriate advertisement candidates according to the position of a user are built as a database in advance and appropriate advertisements according to the position of the user and a period of time starts to be distributed.